Life is a funny old thing. When I left working for an employer back at the end of 2015, I never dreamed I would, in the short space of 5 years time, come back to being employed full time again. Back in June of 2019, I shared the news that I had accepted an increased… Read more about Taking on new (old) challenges
Author Archives: Jonathan
ASUS Zenbook 15 UX533FD review – an Ubuntu friendly developer laptop
I’ve always been a fan of Dell laptops. While often a little more pricey than their counterparts, their laptops are usually well built, typically run Ubuntu without any hassles, and Dell have great after sales service. My last two laptops where Dell. I’d been eyeing the Dell XPS 15 for about a year, and I… Read more about ASUS Zenbook 15 UX533FD review – an Ubuntu friendly developer laptop
Submitting a patch to WordPress core, using Git
I initially encountered version control in my 4th year of programming, when the lead developer of the company I worked at had implemented Subversion as a code backup solution on our local testing server. As we were all required to use Windows at the time, we mostly just installed TortioseSVN, so my command line Subversion… Read more about Submitting a patch to WordPress core, using Git
Nobody likes you when you’re 43
When I met my wife in 2000, I had just turned 23. The previous year, Blink182 had released “What’s my age again?”, and she took great delight playing it for me. Today, I turn 43, meaning it has been 20 years since that event. Amazingly, my 23rd year was probably my own personal “rock bottom”,… Read more about Nobody likes you when you’re 43
Show me your WFH set up
Since we’re all currently in the middle of probably the biggest global crisis since World War 2, many folks in my social timeline are posting/sharing their work from home (WFH) pictures. Whenever I share mine, I always feel like I need to explain the tidiness of it all, because my workspace is one area in… Read more about Show me your WFH set up
An experiment in dark vs light themes
It all started, effectively 2 years ago, with this tweet. I’m not sure when I started following Brent on Twitter, but he posts interesting stuff about Laravel and PHP, and I’ve learned a bunch from his blog. Sometime last year he tweeted this and as I dug deeper into the conversation, I realised something. I… Read more about An experiment in dark vs light themes
Things I’ve been working on lately – part 1
Managesite scripts Over the course of the past 4 years I’ve experimented with a bunch of different local development environments for my freelance client work. I started with Scotch Box, transitioned to Boss Box, and finally back to bare bones LAMP, mostly because I develop on Ubuntu and I find Apache2 to be an easier… Read more about Things I’ve been working on lately – part 1
Beginners guide to testing your Laravel application
Last night I presented my talk on getting started with testing in Laravel at the Developer User Group in Cape Town. These are the slides for this talk.
How much should I charge as a freelancer/freelance developer?
This question, along with “How do I find clients/work?”, is probably the question I get asked the most from folks starting their freelance journey. And then when I tell them what I charge (or used to charge before I started working full-time at Castos), they respond with shock, as it’s usually triple what they were… Read more about How much should I charge as a freelancer/freelance developer?
WP Plugin Tests: planning the course
For personal reasons I don’t tend to publish my year in review or new year goals posts any more. As I start the year, something that I’ve had on my mind since forever was the idea of recording a development related course of some kind. Here are some of the reasons I want to put… Read more about WP Plugin Tests: planning the course